Is No Child Left Behind Unfair?
The Need for National Education Standards
Schools in America are not being evaluated equitably, and the gifted children are among the ones who are suffering.
Pick up any newspaper, or spend a few minutes reading the Internet blogs. The Secretary of Education is traveling around the nation arguing that states should set their own educational standards rather than having a national curriculum because they pay for a lot of their students’ education.
This means that the states that embrace national or world class standards as the basis for their curricula and testing are putting their students at a profound disadvantage to states that have purposely lowered their academic bars so they would give the appearance of doing a better job and receive more federal monies under the tenants of the No Child Left Behind Act. This preceding was a deliberate run-on sentence because it is difficult to get your mind around all of this without seeing it all in one place.
NCLB provides no curricular guidance on the federal level for the individual states to follow, which means that each state is free to set its own set of standards and levels of competencies. Needless to say, there are some vast differences between states’ expectations as a result – what could be top level work in one state as reported on the standardized tests could be barely passing in another. Sixteen states have lowered their expectations as a result of this loophole.
And why should they? How can there be equity or fairness in the classroom today?
No National Standards
The whole question of having 100 percent of all students “proficient” by 2014 seems rather challenging. For example, what does it mean to be “proficient?” Officially, it means that children are measured on annual tests and that their achievement levels show progress every year. This development is recorded as the state’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) score.
The concern is that state assessments and definitions of what it means to be proficient vary from state to state. Each state develops its own standards, how it defines proficiency, and what kind of assessments it will use to chart student achievement. And, it should come as no surprise that many, if not most states, instead of aligning their standards to national or collegiate standards have developed academic expectations that fall far below what students will need for college or the world of work.
There could have been a gathering of educators from around the country to set reasonably appropriate standards taken from the best standards available to meet the needs of American school children. This would then allow the states the opportunities to examine the needs of their children and design the curricula for the different schools that meet local needs.
Gifted Education Needs Standards
Somewhere in the middle of all these discussions, and perhaps lost in the process, is the topic of gifted education, which needs high standards for its students! NCLB does not even talk about gifted and talented children – our country’s greatest natural resource. In fact, even with the scheduled reauthorization of the NCLB Law next year, even greater damage could be done to gifted education.
